Research Impact

This is one of the most common outcomes of a research project. The project could be written up as part of a scientific paper, a PhD thesis, or both. Publishing lets the rest of the world know about the research, what was found and why it is important. It also allows the work to be built upon by other groups and potentially help another group by giving them an answer that they needed.

Research publications may be published as open-access, where the paper is free to read, or closed access, which will cost money to read. Open access papers are often deposited in an online repository, such as Europe PMC. A version of closed-access publications may be made freely available, but these are often pre-prints. This means that the publication has not yet been peer reviewed, where scientific experts in the same field critically assess the research, and so it is not recommended that medical decisions be made based on these types of publications.

Psoriasis research doesn’t just increase our understanding of psoriasis, but also helps to develop the next generation of researchers to help keep the research going. The Psoriasis Association awards PhD Studentships to train new researchers, and promotes and facilitates the Cecil King Memorial Award to support early career researchers.

During the course of a research project, a researcher will give many presentations. These will not only be at their own university, but often at national and international conferences. These presentations can be either a poster or a talk. Giving presentations helps to raise awareness of the research within the scientific community and can also lead to career progression, research development, and future collaborations. A researcher may also be invited to give a talk at a conference. This is seen as an honour, especially if they are invited to be the key note speaker.  

Public engagement is a vital part of research and researchers are encouraged to take part in science outreach events to tell the general public about their work. These outreach events help to raise awareness of psoriasis and the research that is being done to help people with psoriasis.

Outreach events are often done in an engaging and interactive manner – see Science Live for some of the future events happening around the UK, or check out your local university’s event page.

When a research question has been answered, it often leads to new questions - for example, we know this treatment works on a mouse model of psoriasis, but does it work on human tissue samples?

These new questions can then lead to new projects or new funding from sources outside of the Psoriasis Association, that wouldn’t have given funding for the initial project.

Researchers are constantly communicating with each other, sharing results, new methods, or asking questions. These interactions during a research project can lead to new collaborations. This could range from the short term, for example working with another research group who has better method for part of the project, to a long term collaboration, for instance working together on a new, bigger, project which would be simply too much work for the one group.